Orders of the Day — Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 (Amendment) Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 11 May 1973.

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Photo of Mr Douglas Houghton Mr Douglas Houghton , Sowerby 12:00, 11 May 1973

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Perhaps I should preface my remarks by making it clear that this is a Private Member's Bill and that I am speaking as a private Member and not in any sense on behalf of the Opposition. Perhaps I may also be permitted to say that I have been a firm supporter of all measures to prevent cruelty and alleviate suffering among animals for many years—not, let me add, to the exclusion of the equally strong commitment to the promotion of human health, happiness and welfare. I do not claim to be entitled to public recognition for work in this field as are some hon. Members of this House-notably the hon. Members for Gillingham (Mr. Burden) and for Holland with Boston (Mr. Body), and my hon. Friends the Members for Wood Green (Mrs. Joyce Butler) and for Huddersfield, West (Mr. Lomas).

This Bill has to do with experiments on living animals for the purpose of research. The Bill itself deals with only one single, but important, issue. That is the need to encourage and, indeed, to enforce wherever possible the use of alternative methods to carry out this work. The Bill, although short and confined to this one issue, nevertheless raises very wide questions indeed affecting the whole field of medical and scientific research.

This same Bill has been introduced to the House on two previous occasions. The hon. Member for Holland with Boston was given leave to introduce this Bill as far back as 1968. He introduced the Bill again in 1971 and it received a Second Reading on 23rd April 1971 without debate. It then went to Committee and was completed without amendment in one sitting. The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, however, in a persuasive speech to the Committee, explained the practical difficulties in carrying out the proposals in the Bill. They were very important. They cannot be brushed aside, and I will come to them later.

The Committee in 1971 noted what the Under-Secretary said but did not amend the Bill, and, as I said, completed it for return to the House unamended. I believe, however, that it did not come back to the Floor of the House because at that season of the year, and indeed at this season, there are difficulties in getting Bills back to the Floor of the House owing to the running out of days allotted to Private Members' Bills.

While proceedings on the Bill in 1971 were taking place there was another happening in this House on 11th June 1971, when a debate took place on the so-called Littlewood Report. The Little-wood Committee, appointed under the late Sir Sidney Littlewood, was set up in 1963 by the then Home Secretary, Mr. Henry Brooke, now Lord Brooke. Its terms of reference were to consider the present control over experiments on living animals and to consider whether, and if so what, changes are desirable in the law or its administration. There were two hon. Members of this House on that Committee, Sir Hugh Linstead and my hon. Friend the Member for Wood Green.

The committee created in 1963 reported in April 1965. Hon. Members must bear in mind that April 1965 is eight years ago. The Littlewood Report contained no fewer than 83 recommendations. Some required only administrative action such as strengthening the inspectorate. Others required an amendment of the law, and, of the latter, not one, as far as I know, has been implemented. No amendment of the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 has been made as a result of the Littlewood Report.

The position, therefore, is that the Act of 1876 has gone unamended for almost 100 years. I hope, now that hon. Members on both sides of the House are thinking of what they should include in the next General Election manifesto, that we could have a pledge that something will be done about the recommendations of the Littlewood Committee to mark the centenary of the passing of the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876.

The Littlewood Report, although, as I said, it was published in 1965, was not debated in this House until 11th June 1971—six years after publication. I will not apportion blame here because there was a Labour Government in office for quite a lot of that time, and I can make no party point of the delay on either side. Nevertheless I record the fact that the former Home Secretary who set up the Littlewood Committee said in another place in 1969 that the long delay in dealing with the report was becoming a scandal. The former Home Secretary who set up the Littlewood Committee was impatient in 1969 that nothing had been done with the report that was published in 1965. It is now 1973 and the last debate was in 1971. The delay has lasted a further two years.

As for implementation, precisely nothing has been done even yet. I think it needs some explanation why a report on such a sensitive and emotional subject as this was not debated in this House for so long and why the recommendations of the Committee have been left aside for so long. Why has nothing been done? The Committee concluded that the public, so it seems, are prepared to accept experiments on animals for the purpose of saving or prolonging human life. That is the noble purpose which puts the nation's conscience to sleep. This enabled the Under-Secretary to say in a debate on 11th June 1971 that although there was much public interest and concern over cruelty to animals generally, there was surprisingly little interest in experiments on animals."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 11th June 1971; Vol. 818, c. 1398.] We might ask ourselves why this is so. Why is there this surprisingly little interest in experiments on animals? We all know that the feelings and emotions of the British people are quickly and deeply aroused by cruelty to animals. We are frequently teased by our friends overseas for being animal lovers, and it is said we look after our pets better than we look after our children. We certainly know that deer hunting, badger digging, live hare coursing, the export of live animals for slaughter and other abominations arouse widespread concern and opposition. I imagine that if hon. Members on both sides of the House were to look at the records of their postbag they would find that probably the heaviest mail that we receive from time to time relates to cruelty to animals, and at the present time there is a considerable volume of concern about the export of live animals for slaughter.

Why, then, is there less interest and concern for the treatment and fate of tens of thousands of laboratory animals? One reason is that so many people who would otherwise feel deeply disturbed by it regard medical research as necessary and the use of live animals as unavoidable. Another reason is that they cannot feel about what they never see and are not allowed to see. They cannot heed the cries of animals they do not hear.

There is a conspiracy promoted by the 1876 Act to shield the public from the horrors of vivisection. Fears and disquiet are not aroused; they are set at rest by the comforting thought that medical research, the quest for knowledge of human afflictions, the cause and cure of sickness and the promotion of health is deserving of respect and support.

What it is all for, whether it is justified, whether there are alternative methods of biological experiment and whether the bounds of morally defensible treatment of animals are broken the public does not know and, what is more, it cannot find out. The laboratory doors are closed by the 1876 Act. The Littlewood Report recommended that those doors should be opened. I believe that they are also closed because we do not demand that they should be open. Maybe not many of us wish to go to see the harrowing sights but there are those with stouter hearts who could go in and report to us about what is being done. Let us see on television some of the things happening in the laboratories. We get plenty on television about what is happening elsewhere. The doors are still closed because the Government have not implemented the Littlewood recommendation to give greater access.

We do have some figures—the sole concession made to public inquiry. The Home Office annual return is full of them. That they tell the truth I do not deny. But they tell less than the whole truth and in some respects they tell anything but the truth. Statistics alone, although important, tell us no more than the number of experiments, and that the number is growing. The statistics tell us the classification of experiments under the Act. The Littlewood Report said that the number of animals used for research would grow, and that is borne out by experience.

There are now over 5½ million experiments a year on live animals. I must be fair and honest about this. Not all of those 5½ million experiments are surgical or painful experiments. Many take place for the purpose of testing drugs of various kinds and do not involve more than a period of observation. Sometimes the use of drugs experimentally makes animals ill. This is the point of drug testing. It is a statutory obligation upon the pharmaceutical industry to test many of its drugs thoroughly before putting them on the market. We are fully aware of the tragic risks that can be run if that is not done.

Nevertheless there are a great many operations on animals which, if we could know more of them and see them, I am sure we would feel should not be undertaken except under the strongest necessity. Because of our well-known sentiments about cats and dogs, because they are our pets, they have to be classified separately in the Home Office returns. The broad classification of the experiments tells us very little. For example Certificate A is Anaesthesia dispensed with (non-surgical experiments) 4,800,000. What makes up the 4,800.000 experiments in that classification? Certificate B is: Recovery permitted after anaesthesia (surgical experiments) 573,000. That is a lot of animals. Certificate C is: Demonstrations. (Anaesthesia without recovery.) 10,000. That presumably means the destruction of the animal. There are separate classifications for dogs and cats. There were 18.000 dogs and 14,000 cats.

One of the strongest appeals to emotional support is cancer research. There are 400.000 experiments connected with this, 140,000 under anaesthesia, 264,000 without, including 115 cats and 286 dogs. Why should many of these animals be sacrificed and subjected to unpleasant and even painful experiences to convince us that smoking cigarettes is a harmful form of drug addiction? Although the evidence obtained at great pains from animals is now becoming quite convincing, we are still smoking cigarettes by the hundred million as if there were no danger at all. This is where the moral issue comes in. Human beings not only use animals to find out the truth but they ignore that truth when it has been found and want to go on experimenting to find something else which might facilitate a continuation of this habit.

Among the animals used are many not specially classified, and we have to go to the figures for imported animals to find out more of the truth. Monkeys get no special mention. The primates being used in increasing numbers are probably closest to man in intelligence and sensitivity. But they are not so near to our hearts as cats and dogs. They come over by the thousand in crates from all over the world. The raids on the forests and mountain slopes and valleys for monkeys to come to Britain to help prolong the lives of Englishmen will soon lead to serious gaps in the fauna of many lands. The numbers are rising.

Imports of primates for scientific research in 1968 totalled just over 9,000. In 1971 the figures was over 13,000. Where do they mostly come from? The answer is Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Burmah, South-East Asia, Africa, Greenland, Canada, the United States, Mexico, China, Japan and South-West Asia, including Egypt. We can imagine the air freight traffic in primates alone. This is the volume in this growing industry of medical and scientific research using animals.

I come now to the nature and method of research. Who can say, asked the Littlewood Committee, whether if certain biological tests were forbidden satisfactory chemical or other methods of testing could be developed? The committee decided that this important question was outside its terms of reference, so it went unanswered. It asked two other questions of profound importance which my hon. Friend the Member for Wood Green in a note added to the report felt should be answered, even though they were outside the Committee's terms of reference. One was: who is responsible for establishing whether modern medical techniques, with their emphasis on immunology and drug therapy, are developing medical practice in the right direction?

The other question was: Who is to take responsibility for moral or ethical judgment in the use of animals for experimental purposes as such? That was another question outside the committee's terms of reference.

On 31st March 1971 my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield, West, raised on the Adjournment the question of setting up an institute expressly for research into alternatives to living animals. The National Anti-Vivisection Society has been advocating this for a long time. It will be of interest to the House to hear that recently a £10,000 fund was provided by Lady Dowding to be devoted wholly to the aim of finding alternatives. The Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding Fund for Humane Research is the beginning of what I hope will be an upsurge of interest in this neglected sphere of inquiry.

The tissue culture technique developed by Ross Harrison as long ago as 1907 is probably the hope of future restraint in the use of animals. Researches to this end are going on in other countries and some notable people are achieving notable results. I am not technically qualified to assess the value of many of the alternatives issued or of the likely results to come from much work which is now being done. But there are published particulars about these in various available sources.

I admit that progress in this field is by no means satisfactory yet. Nevertheless, in the meantime, we must consider some discipline in the use of live animals. The doctrine that research must go free, that the number of experiments need have no bounds and the import and use of animals no limit is the doctrine of today. I do not believe that it should be accepted any longer.

The search for alternative methods is not a tiresome fad. Those of us who believe in this are not cranks or silly sentimentalists. Our predecessors who banned bull baiting, bear baiting, cock fighting, the caging of wild birds, the gin trap, the docking of horses and the deliberate infection of rabbits with myxo-matosis were not cissies. They were men with the feelings of men; they had feelings of compassion and of horror for forms of cruelty which could no longer be accepted in a civilised society. They had a detestation of the degradation of living creatures by degraded human beings. I am not suggesting for a moment that experimenters are degraded human beings, If they were, public opinion would have attacked them as it attacked those who perpetrated cruelties in the past.

This short Bill proposes to amend the 1876 Act to add the words and without prejudice to the generality of the foregoing provisions of this section it shall be a condition of every such licence that no experiment on a living animal shall be performed under the authority thereof if the purpose of the experiment can be achieved by alternative means not involving an experiment on a living animal". I wish that the Bill implemented many of the recommendations of the Little-wood Committee. Had I known that I would have this extraordinary good fortune this morning of getting the first order on Private Member's Bills I would have included a great many other matters in it. But, believing that probably I would have the last half-hour on Friday afternoon, I thought that a short Bill would be enough. However, my Bill deals only with this narrow issue.

I always like to be fair and honest with the House. Therefore, I shall meet trouble half way, because I know what the Under-Secretary of State has beside him. A glimpse of it was given in the Committee stage of the Bill introduced in 1971 by the hon. Member for Holland with Boston. What the then Undersecretary said—and he will probably refer to it again—dealt with the practical difficulties of implementing the Bill. He stated: The purpose of the Bill would be to add to every licence a condition the effect of which would be that the experimenter could do no experiment on a living animal under the authority of the licence if the purpose of the experiment could be achieved by alternative means not involving such experiment. As I understand it, it would then be open to anyone to bring a prosecution against an experimenter, claiming that he had broken that condition by performing an experiment on a living animal which, in the view of the person bringing the prosecution, could be achieved by alternative means; and, if the court held that that was so, the experimenter would be liable to a financial penalty or, as an alternative on a second conviction, to im- prisonment."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Standing Committee C, 16th June 1971; c. 9–10.] With great respect to what the hon. Gentleman said, if my reading of the 1876 Act is correct, Section 22 requires the written consent of the Home Secretary to any proceedings against a licensed experimenter. Anyone may institute proceedings against an unlicensed experimenter. But he is not the one we are dealing with; he can be caught by the existing law. We are dealing with licensed experimenters, and Section 22 requires the written consent of the Home Secretary to prosecute a licensed experimenter. I hope that it will be understood that, as far as my reading of the Act goes, no experimenter who failed to use an alternative would be open to proceedings by anyone. He could be open to proceedings only with the written consent of the Home Secretary.

The question has been put to me— I was asked it in a radio programme this morning— "Who is to decide whether there is a satisfactory alternative? Is the experimenter to obtain some sanction or approval before he begins?" I would say "No". The experimenter would have to take the responsibility for his own actions and it would be up to him, no doubt with necessary consultation, to discover whether there was a satisfactory alternative. However, if he acted in good faith—even if he made a mistake—I cannot believe that he would be exposed to the risk of prosecution with the consent of the Home Secretary.

Therefore, I do not believe that the point that the experimenter would be in danger of proceedings being taken against him need worry the House. It would put experimenters in the personal difficulty that they had to take a decision, but at present, within the conditions of their licence, they can conduct experiments on as many animals as they like, with no restraint or restriction. I do not think that a statutory cautionary note struck in this matter would be a serious impediment to experimenters who are asked to search for alternatives.

I must be candid with the House. The Littlewood Report on the availability of alternatives was not encouraging. What it says is to be found in paragraph 71. The committee went into this matter and asked many questions. It did not find encouraging signs of the volume or progress being made in respect of alternatives, but people will not search for alternatives as long as they have animals to use.

To have this caution in the statute law would be salutary without being restrictive. We are the people to say that these experiments are on our behalf, conducted in our establishments, with our research staff paid for with our money. We are the people to decide. I believe that the public want—and certainly would want if they knew more of what is actually going on—to reduce the rising toll of misery, multilation and death amongst laboratory animals. No informed public opinion is brought to bear on this matter. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals referred to this matter in its evidence to the Littlewood Committee when it said that Animal experimentation constitutes a moral and social problem of the first magnitude and one that does not exclusively concern the expert. The committee agreed with this view and added: It is right that what is done for the benefit of the community should be understood and accepted by that community. That is the challenge being thrown out on behalf of the community.

I believe that this stipulation should be made. If it proves to be a serious impediment in the way of all reasonable progress in research it could be reviewed, but something has to be done. I do not think the House can go on ignoring this for very much longer. I would like to see a full review, now, of the whole field covered by the Littlewood Committee. In 1971 the then Under-Secretary of State said that the Government had not had time themselves to consider the full implications of the Littlewood Report and formulate their views on it. I accept that. In 1971 they had not had time because the report came out in 1965, when the Conservative Party was not the Government, but a little more time has elapsed, and I hope that the present Under-Secretary of State will be able to give the House more information about a matter of grave importance and moral consequence to the nation—a matter which is unhappily shielded behind the closed doors of our laboratories.

I want to refer to two other questions which arise from the comprehensive report of the Littlewood Committee. It touched on the vitally important question whether the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876, with its almost free licence for experiment on animals, should be integrated with a wider measure providing for evaluation of all biological and scientific research. To conduct research in a laboratory with no purpose beyond making a narrow biological discovery may be unrelated to other purposes of human advance. It may, indeed, be for purely commercial purposes, and let us not overlook the fact that many experiments are conducted by commercial undertakings. The experimenters are given virtually a blank cheque upon nature's dwindling reserves of animal life.

I ask, in conclusion, upon what pinnacle do we base human life and well-being that denies all rights whatsoever to every species but our own? That is my final question to the House.